Eating the corpse of a domestic cat is alike to cannibalism unless you are an orc or a caveman. This will give you the aggravate monster intrinsic, but will not decrease your luck: "You feel that eating the kitten was a bad idea." While you should not sacrifice a former pet that died tame, offering a cat corpse is otherwise safe.

Beware! At lower levels, hostile (not your pet) kittens, and other felines are extremely dangerous. They move much faster than you do, and thus may attack you multiple times per turn. Deaths at the hands of cats account for about .6 percent of deaths on nethack.alt.org.

The kitten is one of three possible starting pets, the others being dogs and ponies (for Knights). They are capable of growing up into housecats after they kill enough monsters.

The kitten and its grown up forms are sometimes better fighters than newly started characters, and can be used to fight for you in the early stages of the game. Nevertheless, they may be more vulnerable than you against passive attacks, such as acidic monsters or floating eyes. They also are extremely vulnerable to falling rock traps and rolling boulder traps and many die to this within the first hundred turns of a game.

The large cat is the final form of a grown-up housecat, and is therefore usually encountered as a player's pet (especially with early game characters, as they are easy to obtain by training a starting kitten).

As with their brethren, they are excellent fighters to have as companions to early game characters, but remain vulnerable to passive attacks. Eventually, it may be worthwhile to attempt to upgrade your large cat to another monster using a polymorph trap, especially if you have more than one pet.

Cats are one of the most common pets. Many roles begin the game with one.

Taming wild cats is usually easy, because all sizes of cat are considered domestic animals. Throwing a meaty treat, a safe fresh meat-based corpse, or processed human food at a hostile or peaceful cat will tame it. Throwing any other comestible at a cat will at least render it peaceful, with the exception of cream pies and eggs (which will break on impact).

Well-known quadruped domestic animal from the family of
predatory felines (_Felis ochreata domestica_), with a thick,
soft pelt; often kept as a pet. Various folklores have the
cat associated with magic and the gods of ancient Egypt.

So Ulthar went to sleep in vain anger; and when the people
awakened at dawn - behold! Every cat was back at his
accustomed hearth! Large and small, black, grey, striped,
yellow and white, none was missing. Very sleek and fat did
the cats appear, and sonorous with purring content.